Humble suggestion: daily tests reset at midnight, or show a timer

[jollino]

Hello all,
I have a humble suggestion for the daily tests. Right now you can only do them after 24 hours have elapsed from the previous successful attempt, otherwise a message such as "Sorry, you've already submitted an IPv6 traceroute within the last 24 hours." appears, and the text field is locked. (I have no idea whether it's actually also checked server-side; if not, unlocking it would make cheating on the schedule quite easy.)
Anyway, it would be nice to have the message say: "please try again in X hours" or "in X hours and Y minutes," so at least we can get a better idea of when to do it to maximize efficiency, so to speak.
Of course, I'm sure many other people in addition to me would prefer if the timer reset at midnight, ie. instead of "once every 24 hours" it would effectively be a real "daily test."

Just my two cents. Please don't shoot me. :)

[sput]

Hi there


Midnight in which timezone?
Midnight UTC? Or midnight according to the preferences?
The problem with the time-difference set in the preferences is that the summertime start end end dates are different in each timezone.
A setting like 'Europe/Amsterdam' makes more sense. This would also make a '%z' display (numeric timezone of poster) possible.
A UTF-8 default characterset would also be nice (I wander what happens with 'Спутник' (Sputnik)).

A timer would be nice tough.


Regards,
Rob

[jollino]

I think that any time zone will do, and everyone can calculate what local time that corresponds to. Sticking with UTC would probably be the easiest way to do so. (Flickr uses 00:00 UTC to reset its "... per day" counters, for instance.)
Those who are doing the daily tests have probably reached the upper levels of the certifications, and are quite likely to know how to convert UTC to local time. :D

[sput]

Hi there


UTC is excellent. Displaying post times in UTC is OK too. I'm surprised it isn't the default.

Anyway, non ISO-8859-1 is stored as ampersand-hash-decimal_unicode_value-colon. So it is possible to use non ISO-8859-1 glyphs.


Regards,
Rob

[keithfernie]

If the timer was reset at midnight it could become a 2 day test for some, with one set of tests being run just before midnight then another set of tests being run just after midnight. Is this acceptable?

[jollino]

Let's assume you're in NYC. That'd UTC-05, so midnight UTC is 7pm local. If the timer is reset at midnight, it is true that you could do one test at 5 pm and another at 8 pm during the same day, but in a given "UTC day" you can still only do one. In other words, if you do "tomorrow's" test at 8 pm, you still need to wait 23 hours for it to reset at 7 pm local before you can do another one.
It's no different than someone in London (whose local time is effectively UTC) for whom the timer would be reset at midnight local, except that people not on UTC would have it happen at a different time of the day.

The advantage would be that if one day you are late, you can do it earlier the next day. Right now if you do it at 10 am, you have to wait until 10 am of the next day to do another one. You have to essentially be on time and it'll still be pushed forward on the clock every day, and sometimes it's easier to just skip a day in order to do it early the day before so there is room to add a daily delay to it.

Flickr does exactly that: at midnight UTC, all the counters are reset. This means that if a group has a limit of 3 photos per day and you have posted 3, you only need to wait until midnight UTC to have your 3 daily slots available again. The same thing happens with the statistics, which mark a new day at midnight UTC. In my case, since I'm in Italy, this happens at 1 am. For someone in Memphis, it happens at 6 pm.

And yes, I'm probably just being a pain about it. It just surprised me that the required interval was 24 hours since the previous test, rather than "one per day" as I had assumed: to me (and I imagine to most people), "daily" means "you do one today (at any point during the day), and then another tomorrow (at any point during the day)."

Annoyingly yours, :D
D.

[mianosm]

I'd like to bump this. If there is anyway to make this per calendar day that would be great.....mmmmmk?